


lies

by fitzgarbage



Category: Monsta X (Band)
Genre: College AU, Fake Dating, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-08
Updated: 2017-01-08
Packaged: 2018-09-15 16:27:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9244091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fitzgarbage/pseuds/fitzgarbage
Summary: Minhyuk lies a lot because of Jooheon.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mnsg](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mnsg/gifts).



> um hppy birthday bri?
> 
>  
> 
> [this is what i listened to while i wrote this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLazpgiL8Gs)

The first lie isn’t even Minhyuk’s, and it isn’t even big. Honestly, it comes from a good moral place, which is more than can be said for some of the lies that follow it. And the first lie isn’t on Minhyuk’s conscience, it’s on Jooheon’s.

It happens like this: Minhyuk is trying to get to class, but he’s being followed. It’s this guy who won’t leave him alone. They share a literature class in the mornings and Minhyuk made the mistake of agreeing to work with him in class on the second day and now it’s all out of proportion.

“But I got you a birthday gift,” the guy is saying.

“I didn’t ask for a birthday gift,” says Minhyuk, looking straight ahead, walking fast on frozen sidewalk through cold breeze to get to his building.

“I just want to know why you won’t try it. You’ll never know what we could have been if you never give me a chance.”

Minhyuk turns around. Stops walking. If he’s late for his class, that’s how it’s got to be today. He’s been too easy on this guy for too many weeks now and it’s not funny anymore, or flattering, it just needs to stop. “Because I don’t want to,” says Minhyuk, looking the guy right in the face. “Because I’m not interested.”

“But why?” whines the guy. “Why not?”

And then the lie happens.

“Because he’s taken, dude.” Jooheon, a tertiary acquaintance of Minhyuk’s, happens to be walking by at the right time. Minhyuk looks at Jooheon shocked, but Jooheon doesn’t return it. He looks nothing but a little bit determined as he throws a stiff arm around Minhyuk’s shoulder. It’s not intimate, it feels a more like he’s been put in stocks.

“Cool to run into you, Honey,” Jooheon says stiffly. “Will I see you later?”

Minhyuk has to be thankful. He tries to thank Jooheon with his eyes. He says, “Oh, definitely, Babe.”

The guy gapes. Minhyuk and Jooheon stand there, touching like that, cold wind picking up and blowing Minhyuk’s hair around. Their sides are stiff against one another. Minhyuk’s not sure what to do next.

“Why didn’t you just tell me you had a boyfriend?” asks the guy finally, when Minhyuk is deciding whether to jerk himself out from under Jooheon’s heavy arm and run inside or let this keep happening.

“I don’t know,” says Minhyuk. He glances up at Jooheon’s face. Jooheon’s staring the guy down; it’s a little intimidating. “Do not know.”

Jooheon says, “Have a good day, sir. Stop hitting on my Boyfriend.” Then he starts leading Minhyuk away, toward the building where his class is.

As soon as they’re out of earshot, Jooheon whispers, “Sorry. I’m just gonna make sure you get to class. I’m worried about that guy, he freaks me out.” He laughs a little, like this is uncomfortable for him. It is for Minhyuk, too.  

Minhyuk says, “Really, thank you. He’s been up my ass since September.”

“Don’t mention it.” Jooheon smiles. They’re in the building now. “Where’s your class?”

“Second floor. I can take it from here. Thanks again. See you Friday?”

Jooheon unwraps himself from Minhyuk, which makes him so much lighter, but not exactly in time. One of Minhyuk’s friends from class, a boy called Hoseok, walks by on the way to the staircase just as Jooheon’s letting go.

“Whaaaat?” Hoseok says. “Minhyuk? Boyfriend? Finally?” He looks to Jooheon, juts out a hand to shake, and says, “Hi, I’m Hoseok. Minhyuk’s personal assistant, you may have heard of me? I haven’t heard of you.” he raises his eyebrows at Minhyuk.

Minhyuk and Jooheon exchange a weird look. Jooheon opens his mouth, probably to deny it and apologize, but Minhyuk has actually been harassed by Hoseok every day for the entire term about this. And the last term, and all the way back to Math 95 when they started studying together. According to Hoseok, Minhyuk’s problems would all go away if he “just got laid.”

But what Minhyuk really needs is for Hoseok to let him be, and this situation makes that convenient. So he says, “Oh, this is Jooheon. Sorry, must have been too distracted with, you know, math? To remember to tell you we were dating.”

“Hm,” says Hoseok, narrowing his eyes. “You know I’m supposed to vet them. Or else I’m shirking my duties.”

“No, I’ve got it handled,” says Minhyuk. “See, I didn’t need you after all. Your employment is terminated.” He grins. Jooheon isn’t touching him anymore. They’re standing next to each other, and as Hoseok eyes them suspiciously, Minhyuk is realizing that this was the wrong lie to start.

“No, I’m still gonna vet him,” says Hoseok finally. “Can’t let you into the wrong hands.” He looks Jooheon up and down, and Minhyuk glances up to see that he’s pursing his lips a little and puffing out, like to try to challenge Hoseok back.

“Guys,” says Minhyuk.

“Let’s all hang out this weekend?” says Hoseok, grinning and evil.

Minhyuk rolls his eyes. Hoseok is causing problems where he prides himself on solving them.

“Sure,” says Jooheon. Minhyuk wonders why.

“Great,” says Hoseok.

“Fine,” says Jooheon, shrugging.

Minhyuk thinks they are both awful.

 

Minhyuk met Jooheon in his second year of college, when he took an intro to psychology course just for fun.

The class met at eleven in the morning on Mondays, and it was Jooheon’s first year, so it happened that Minhyuk was the first person Jooheon talked to in any of his classes in all of college. They sat next to each other by chance.

Jooheon is a psychology major. He wants to work on studies. Minhyuk is an art history major, but he’s followed Jooheon to so many psychology classes in the past two years, just so he can have an excuse to keep studying with him, that he’s thought about declaring it as a minor.

This year, they’re in abnormal psych. It’s really fun, but they both have a tendency to self-diagnose. Minhyuk knows more about Jooheon than he does about any casual friend he’s ever had in his life.

He knows that Jooheon is fine with his own dirty dishes, but not with his roommate’s, but that’s probably not OCD, right? He knows that when Jooheon reads the symptoms for ADD, he _gets it_ , but it’s not deviant, distressful, and dysfunctional, so he’s probably okay. Minhyuk agrees; he doesn’t seem to have problems, he’s just noisy and he switches hobbies a lot.

Jooheon, also, knows that Minhyuk’s struggled with anxiety all his life, and depression since moving out for college. A lot of people don’t know that, he doesn’t like to talk about it, but there’s something about sitting over coffee discussing cases and trying to understand the way brains work that makes it really easy. Jooheon seems to relate, and it makes Minhyuk wonder if he might really be just fine.

Minhyuk tries not to overshare, because he wants Jooheon to think good things about him.

Honestly, they aren’t very close. They don’t hang out unless it’s about school, but Minhyuk almost looks forward to midterms and finals now, because he and Jooheon get to have cram dates. Which is Jooheon’s word, not Minhyuk’s. The first time he called it a “date,” Minhyuk almost had a pulmonary embolism. Then, because of all the psychology he’d been studying, he identified it, instead, as an activation of the sympathetic nervous system. Not life-threatening, though it felt that way at the time.

Minhyuk likes spending time with Jooheon. He knows the denim jacket Jooheon always wears, how the cuff looks around his wrist when they’re leaned over a little table in the library or the coffee shop near campus, writing notes down. There’s a little laugh Jooheon does that Minhyuk thinks he hears sometimes when Jooheon isn’t around. He sometimes sees things that remind him of the little details of Jooheon that he sees the most; the shape of dark roots that grow out into his dyed-red hair come to his mind when he sees a bird at the feeder out back at his mom’s house. The curve of his lips, dramatic, comes to mind a lot when he’s studying art. Jooheon looks, in the right light, when they sit by the window at the coffee shop near campus in the late afternoon, like a Boucher painting. Soft and almost translucent. Pleasant, curvy, sweet.

Minhyuk looks at art so much that the sometimes the chaos of the world is hard to process. But sometimes it’s refreshing to see things out of place, like one week when Jooheon has a big red pimple in the hollow of a cheek. Minhyuk almost wants to compliment it.

Minhyuk and Jooheon aren’t even really friends, but they know each other well.

They are not dating, not even close, but Hoseok insists that they need to have a double date, and Jooheon stares Hoseok down, towering a little, challenging him right back, and he says, “Sure.”

They’re not close, they just know each other, but when Jooheon agrees, Minhyuk is nauseous with excitement.

Jooheon texts Minhyuk later. “Lol.”

 

Minhyuk didn’t honestly think Hoseok was serious about the double date thing. Hoseok doesn’t even know Minhyuk well enough to be doing something like this, but that’s how Hoseok is. He’s decided that he and Minhyuk are close, and he acts accordingly, and Minhyuk would never stop it. Hoseok is fun to be around, if not a little overbearing sometimes.

Hoseok texts Minhyuk about it every day until they have a plan to meet for lunch on Saturday.

Only when they meet does Minhyuk begin to realize that Hoseok’s skepticism isn’t so much surprise that Minhyuk has found himself a boyfriend and forgotten to mention it, but rather he is skeptical as to whether Minhyuk and Jooheon are dating at all.

They aren’t.

That’s the main thing about it. They’re not really dating, and what started as Minhyuk wanting Hoseok off his chest is now something he has to choose to defend or to admit defeat in. If Minhyuk admits now that he is single and pretending to date Jooheon, he will look pathetic. Minhyuk and Jooheon discuss this in depth over text leading up to Saturday.

It’s actually Jooheon who insists they move forward with the double date. Minhyuk says he’s sorry and that he’ll admit it to Hoseok as soon as he gets a chance, or at least think of an excuse, but it’s Jooheon who texts back, “Don’t want your friend to think you’re a loser. I started this anyway, let’s do it.”

Minhyuk says, “im sorry!!!”

Jooheon replies, “you will not belive how good of a boyfriend I can be.”

And then a winky face. And Minhyuk’s next lie is just one of omission. He doesn’t admit that he actually likes the idea of going on a date with a Jooheon. He doesn’t admit that he’s excited about it.

 

The date, when it happens, isn’t as nice as Minhyuk imagined, but it couldn’t really ever be. Going to sleep the night before, Minhyuk imagined them together in a Botticelli painting, feeding each other grapes.

Where they really meet is a loud, high-traffic deli just far enough from campus that Minhyuk isn’t worried about being spotted. The lights inside are bright and there are very few windows, like a prison cell, and it’s nothing like art but it is cheap so Minhyuk finds himself there fairly often.

Hoseok and Hyungwon are already there. They’re sitting, like they do, next to each other in the booth instead of across the table. They’re leaning on each other. Hoseok is scratching Hyungwon’s head.

Minhyuk, who met up with Jooheon ten minutes ago to walk over together, feels like they should have met earlier to practice. It’s not just Hoseok who is looking at them strangely, Hyungwon is, too. Though, Minhyuk has met Hyungwon a few times before and sort of thinks he just looks like that.

Either way, Minhyuk and Jooheon are both being appraised before they even have a chance to say anything, and Minhyuk is too shy around Jooheon to initiate any contact or do anything that would make it look like they’re anything at all to each other, but Jooheon wastes no time in taking Minhyuk’s hand and lacing his fingers with it.

Minhyuk looks up at him just slightly, and Jooheon looks down, and in the moment it is convincing.

They stop at the table for a second to say hello before they get in line to order. Jooheon doesn’t let go of Minhyuk’s hand.

In fact, in line, the whole time they’re waiting, he doesn’t let go. Not until he has to dig for his wallet and pay for both of them.

Minhyuk whispers, “They’re not looking, it’s okay, I can pay,” and Jooheon says, “Don’t worry about it.”

They sit down on the same side, and Minhyuk sits tensely for a moment, inches between them. Just because he’s supposed to be dating Jooheon doesn’t mean he’s got to touch him; he doesn’t have to feel him up. Like, if he were really dating Jooheon, he probably would want to sit close like Hyungwon and Hoseok do, he might want to rest his head on Jooheon’s shoulder, which is solid and looks soft and is just the right height, but this is fake. They’re not really dating, and Hoseok will probably find out anyway, and in the space of about thirty seconds this all starts to seem like a horrible idea. Which it is. Minhyuk isn’t even a good liar.

Then Jooheon reaches under the table and rubs Minhyuk’s thigh. Unintrusive, sweet, just what someone would do in real life. It helps Minhyuk come back into the character he’s playing. He does what he would do if they were really dating; he doesn’t pretend, he rests his head on Jooheon’s shoulder, and it’s just as nice as he thought it might be.

Hoseok doesn’t interview Jooheon as intently as Minhyuk worried he would. It’s actually pleasant, once the food gets to the table and they relax a little. Hoseok asks Jooheon what he studies, and makes the connection that Minhyuk sure has been taking a lot of psychology classes lately. It humiliates Minhyuk for a second, but Jooheon catches it smoothly. He says, “Oh yeah, we take a lot of classes together. It’s where we got to know each other.”

Minhyuk peels himself off Jooheon’s shoulder to eat, and, he realizes as the absence hits him, it takes him out of the cloud of Jooheon’s _smell_. It’s half a cologne and half the way his natural scent mingles with it. Minhyuk realizes, as he eats his sandwich and tries not to seem like he’s overwhelmed by being this close to Jooheon (because if they were boyfriends he’d be used to it, he wouldn’t be this affected) and tries to catch more of the pleasant, slightly spicy smell that he associates with being near Jooheon.

Hoseok asks, “So you met in psych class? How’d you get together?” He’s smooth, he trails off into a bite of his sandwich like it’s not a test question.

Minhyuk worries that they haven’t practiced, or even bothered to get their stories straight. What if Jooheon says something about Minhyuk that Hoseok knows isn’t true? How will they recover if they take the lie too far? But Jooheon is so good. He doesn’t even blink. He says, “I saw someone else hitting on him, and I was like, man, I’ve liked this guy for so long, I can’t let it go anymore.”

“Really?” says Hoseok.

“Yeah. So Minhyuk rejected the guy and I kind of,” he smiles like he feels something warm and his dimples show and his eyes crescent and he’s _convincing_ when he says, “I kind of swooped in.”

Hoseok looks at Minhyuk for confirmation. Minhyuk thinks his voice is weak enough to lay bare all the lies when he says, “We’ve um, been together ever since.” He tries a smile.

“How long has that been?” Hoseok asks.

“Two months?” say both Minhyuk and Jooheon, at the same time, in the same intonation, without having ever decided that was the truth.

The rest of the date goes like that. Minhyuk fights to behave with sanity, but every time he thinks he’s losing his grip, Jooheon brings him back to the moment.

Hoseok doesn’t do anything truly evil; he seems very quickly to believe them, and by the end he drops the scrutinizing and just talks to Jooheon like a friend. Like he does. He makes friends easily once he decides to, and by the end Minhyuk and Hyungwon almost don’t have anything to say while Hoseok and Jooheon get to know each other.

Before they leave, Minhyuk has a short but vivid fantasy of Hoseok asking them to kiss.

In his fantasy, Minhyuk starts to say something like, “We don’t owe that to you,” but Jooheon shuts him up before he can get it all the way out. In his fantasy, Jooheon’s lips are soft and he tastes like fruit, even though that wouldn’t make sense because he’s just been eating a salami sandwich. It’s okay, it’s not real. Hoseok is a friend, not a monster, so of course he doesn’t try to get them to perform for him, especially because he seems to have offered his blessing. He doesn’t need proof like that. Minhyuk was stupid for thinking Hoseok might make them do that.

When they get up to leave, after finishing their food and loitering for a while, refilling their drinks and ordering another side of fries for the table, Minhyuk stands up and finds he’s shaky.

That night, the lie Minhyuk tells himself is that it’s not too late to stop this without hurting anyone.

 

Hoseok doesn’t berate Minhyuk anymore for “trying to be single forever.” Instead he berates him for keeping Jooheon from him for so long. “Your boyfriend rules,” he says. “I like him. We should hang out more.”

“Yeah,” says Minhyuk. It’s unconvinced and unconvincing, but he’s actually been texting Jooheon all weekend.

“that was actually fun,” Minhyuk sent, the afternoon after the date.

“your friends are really cool,” Jooheon texted. “&& i like that deli. thx 4 introducing me.”

Minhyuk tells Jooheon a little more about Hoseok and Hyungwon, and then Jooheon says something about how he’s sorry they’re not really dating because he doesn’t have another excuse to hang out with them, and Minhyuk agrees that it really is such a shame. Over text, it’s hard to read tone, and Minhyuk has trouble hearing sarcasm in Jooheon’s voice.

They see each other for Abnormal Psych on Thursday, and it feels a little weird. They sit together, but it feels very far. After class gets out, they often walk to the coffee shop or the Mexican restaurant down the road to talk about class while the material’s still fresh.

So, class ends, and they get up from their seats, and Minhyuk’s got a couple things to pack up but Jooheon’s already hiked up his pants and put his denim jacket (the one with the cuffs, the one he always wears) back on, slung his bag over just one shoulder and shifted from foot to foot while Minhyuk finished up.

“Should we um,” says Jooheon as they walk out of class together. “Coffee? Or food?” It feels different. Weighted now, where it never was before.

“Coffee’s good,” says Minhyuk, shrugging like he doesn’t even care.

They walk quietly, and it’s really, really cold in the way where they bundle into themselves and the air holds sounds so they don’t travel far. So it feels very quiet, and Jooheon clears his throat once, but mostly they don’t talk.

The coffee shop is high-windowed, woody, dark, comfortable, and the barista knows them and greets them as a unit. Everything for Minhyuk is a little heightened. At the counter, on a whim, Minhyuk orders Jooheon’s regular drink for him (a mocha with whipped cream) and pays for them both.

They sit down. They look at each other. It’s the time of day, and the time of year, where the light is right and Jooheon looks like he should be painted. He’s perfectly arranged, pleasing, curvy in some places and sharp in others, his lips are so pink and soft and his eyes reflect glittery pinpoints of light, and his black shirt clings to his neck, rumples over his collarbones in a way that reveals their shape, catch light, the bridge of his nose is highlighted, and Minhyuk looks at him for an amount of time that he doesn’t know, until a bus passes by the window and flickers Jooheon’s perfect light and drags Minhyuk back to the moment. He takes a sip of his chai.

“How’s it going,” chuckles Jooheon, not a trace of judgement in his voice.

Minhyuk’s next lie is this. “Great.”

 

Hoseok invites them to a party.

A lot of people from school will be there, friends and acquaintances, and if they go, they’ll have to continue to pretend to be boyfriends until they pretend to break up. And that’s when it hits Minhyuk, truly, for the first time. There’s a shelf life to this. There’s a time when texting Jooheon about this mutual joke that they’ve accidentally perpetuated will expire. When Hoseok asking after Jooheon will be done. When Jooheon, who has started meeting Minhyuk outside the class he has with Hoseok and saying hello and throwing an arm around Minhyuk (which gets lighter, less like a plank of wood and closer molded to his body every time he does it), walking Minhyuk to wherever he goes next, will stop happening. They’ve fake-dated to serve a purpose, but the purpose is ending, and now they need to start talking about fake-breaking up.

But they haven’t even fake-kissed yet, they’ve hardly fake-done anything except look at each other strangely and act like a couple for Hoseok and the creep in Minhyuk’s lit class, who sucks, but Minhyuk can’t hate him so much, because he was the reason for this whole situation.

Minhyuk isn’t ready to fake-break up, really. He likes fake-dating Jooheon. But he doesn’t want to invite him to this party of Hoseok’s friend’s and have everyone see and know and think and then have get even deeper into the lie.

So, he brings it up to Jooheon. Jooheon understands Minhyuk. He gets him better than any casual friend Minhyuk has ever had, because they study psychology together and talk about how their brains work. Jooheon feels safe to Minhyuk, even though Jooheon is also a major source of stress in Minhyuk’s life, these days.

Minhyuk is not a competent liar, but he doesn’t have to lie to look like he likes Jooheon, and he doesn’t want to fake-break up without fake-kissing first.

Still, that’s selfish, so he lies and pretends he doesn’t care when he tells Jooheon the situation. Hoseok has invited us to a party as a couple, and if we go people will see us together, which might be too much for a fake-relationship, so maybe we should fake-break up instead. Minhyuk lies and pretends like he’s not getting attached to this role.

He lies again and pretends he’s not affected (he pretends like he doesn’t crumple to the floor squeaking at his phone in his dorm when Jooheon responds, pretends he doesn’t weird out his roommate Changkyun so much that he’s got to think of another lie to make his behavior seem normal. “My sister had a baby, and he’s cute,” is what he settles on, and for the record, it comes back to him six months later when Changkyun refers to Minhyuk as an uncle and Minhyuk easily denies it. But by that time he’s already dating Jooheon, so coming back from that lie isn’t so hard as it would have been.)

Jooheon’s reply says, “I like Hoseok!! i wanna party w him. if we have 2 go as a couple i guess thats fine lol. if its cool w u?”

That’s when Changkyun sees Minhyuk squirming around on the floor and says, “You good?”

 

So, they go to the party, and they go together. Jooheon meets Minhyuk at his dorm beforehand. Changkyun is there, and he raises his eyebrows, but doesn’t say anything.

“Nice dorm,” says Jooheon. “Nicer than mine. Hey, I’m Jooheon.”

“Changkyun.” Changkyun looks to Minhyuk like he needs more information.

“Jooheon is my,” starts Minhyuk, and then he doesn’t know, so he panics and says, “boyfriend.” It’s forward, but they’ve been getting into character earlier, staying for longer, committing to their roles better as they get more comfortable with the lie.

Anyway, Jooheon doesn’t deny it.  

Minhyuk, breath fluttering a little, tries to change the subject. “Good that you’re wearing that,” he says hoarsely, about the denim jacket that Jooheon always wears. Today, though, he’s got a green bomber jacket over it, and his dark jeans have a rip in one knee, and he’s done something with his hair so it’s out of his face. Minhyuk glances in the hall mirror at his own outfit. “We’ll look good together.”

“Yeah, looks great,” says Jooheon, smiling in the way that makes his cheeks look squishy, eyes small, dimples deep. Minhyuk takes a deep breath and shoves his wallet in his back pocket. He leads Jooheon out.

It’s a bit of a walk to the frat house where the party is, but not too far. It is really cold, though, and Jooheon and Minhyuk curl into themselves to stay warm, blowing clouds in front of them.

Until Jooheon takes a hand out of the pocket of his green bomber jacket and puts it into the pocket of Minhyuk’s oversized black coat. Minhyuk lets their fingers tangle. Shoulders brush and Jooheon kind of tugs Minhyuk along, and nobody says anything.

Minhyuk wants to ask. Is this fake?

Is this what people who are lying and pretending to date do? Hold hands when no one is looking?

Do they talk as much as we do? Do they keep it up for this long?

Minhyuk says, “Does anyone know this is a lie?”

“No,” says Jooheon, like he’s answering a different question, maybe one about lunch. “Just you. What about you?”

“Just you,” agrees Minhyuk, and they walk with their warm hands tangled in Minhyuk’s pocket, warm enough to radiate it through Minhyuk’s whole body, close enough to smell Jooheon and feel wrapped up in him.

They get to the party, and it’s loud and the house is throbbing. It’s a song Minhyuk knows well, one with a video he likes, where the singer gyrates in a bikini and he can’t look away. He half-knows the dance, and he’d be doing it now if not for having a Jooheon here with him that he needs to impress.

But Jooheon cackles and goes, “Oh, I love this song!” and yanks his hand out of Minhyuk’s to do the dance, halfway and with a dead-eyed look that he directs right at Minhyuk while lip syncing.

Minhyuk laughs. He says, “Me, too,” and then when Jooheon comes back he throws his arm around Minhyuk’s back like he’s been doing since they started this. It feels like it belongs there, these days.

In the house, they get drinks, and they mingle a little. They find Hyungwon clinging to Hoseok like he’ll drown if he lets go, and Hoseok insists on taking them around and introducing them to some people. Hoseok seems to really like Jooheon, but it doesn’t make Minhyuk feel left out. Minhyuk is just happy to be here.

Jooheon sees some people he knows, and he mostly just says, “This is Minhyuk,” but the way they’re standing together makes it clear what they are to each other. What they are pretending to be to each other, Minhyuk corrects himself. Because this is a lie. It doesn’t feel like one anymore, but the only reason it’s gotten so easy is that they’ve gotten good at acting.

There’s someone outside on the patio, where Minhyuk and Jooheon go to take a breath with fresh drinks, who they both know. She seems very excited to see them there together; she says they really make sense as a couple. They both smile. Minhyuk starts to feel sick.

It’s the drinks, or something. He’s nauseous.

It’s the lowered inhibition; it’s the truth he can’t deny. This is weird, right?

Here they are, at a party as a couple, and everyone here thinks they’re dating, but they’re not.

Minhyuk’s a little drunk. He feels sick. Hoseok peeks his head out the side door and sees them and starts dragging Hyungwon over.

Before they get through the languid bodies to the corner where Jooheon and Minhyuk are standing close, Minhyuk throws back the rest of the too-strong gin drink he’s got.

It hits him fast. Hoseok and Hyungwon stand with them, but Minhyuk doesn’t think they really talk about anything. Minhyuk leans on Jooheon; he gets touchy when he’s drunk.

Jooheon leans back. They go inside and find a place to sit down.

Minhyuk gets touchy when he’s drunk, so he holds onto Jooheon’s thigh. He also loses the ability to judge the passage of time; they might sit there a long time. He gets confused when he’s drunk, too, about his place in the world. Once, Changkyun repeated a conversation they’d had in which Minhyuk said with full confidence that he was going to become a gymnast. It took three shots to get him there. His tolerance isn’t high.

Minhyuk, when drunk, isn’t completely sure who he is or why.

He finds himself sitting with Jooheon on a couch in a corner somewhere, where the throbbing of the music is still heavy and the flashing of the lights still changes the entire mood of Jooheon’s face every few seconds, to blue and red and green. Sitting like that, Minhyuk asks, “Why do you do this?”

“Do what?” asks Jooheon, smiling over, dimpled and blue, then red.

“Pretend to date me.”

Jooheon doesn’t answer right away. While he thinks, Minhyuk decides that Jooheon might be pretty drunk, too. He didn’t think he would be, because he drank the same amount and he’s bigger and so much squishier than Minhyuk, but he blinks slow and purses his lips like he’s fighting to make sense of himself. Minhyuk thinks it’s _cute_ that Jooheon’s a lightweight. He’s incredibly endeared.

When Jooheon answers, he just says, “It’s been fun, right?”

Minhyuk says “Yeah” and “Yep” at the same time.

Jooheon says, “It’s been fun.”

Minhyuk remembers, on their only date, when Jooheon said he’d liked Minhyuk since they met. He’d sounded like he meant it. He wonders where the truth starts and the lie ends.

“Do you like me?” Minhyuk asks. When he says it, it sounds obvious. It sounds like something they should have addressed a long time ago, before they started dating, but only when people were looking. Before they started this thing where they would take turns pushing it further, just a little at a time, until they landed here, where they send each other good-night and good-morning texts and walk each other to class and meet for lunch twice a week. They still haven’t kissed, though, not for anyone or for themselves, and Minhyuk almost hurts with how much he wants to. “Do you like me,” he breathes, too quiet even to hear, close, under the throbbing music and the lights that change.

“Yeah,” says Jooheon, close, and then they close the distance and they kiss, and Jooheon’s lips are soft, like a Bernini sculpture, like Minhyuk imagined they would be.

 

They’re drunk the first time, but the second, they aren’t.

After the third, in Minhyuk’s dorm, they talk about it.

“This isn’t fake, right?” says Minhyuk. “It’s not fake?”

“It’s not fake,” says Jooheon, who has chilly, soft hands up under Minhyuk’s shirt and is kissing the corner of his neck and shoulder for no one but them.

“Have you liked me since we met? Like you told Hoseok?”

“Yeah. Sorry.” Jooheon kisses Minhyuk again, slow and warm, and when he pulls back his hair is messy and the light in the barely-drawn venetian blinds haloes him just a little.

“Me too,” says Minhyuk.

 

The only lie Minhyuk tells after that is the day they first started dating.

 

**Author's Note:**

> baby's first.... monsta x fic...  
> [my twitter](http://twitter.com/bts_leg)//[my tumblr](http://jinbutevil.tumblr.com)


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